Modernização tardia e desigual: o processo histórico de inovações tecnológicas na agricultura brasileira.

Abstract

There has been a long time felt the need to review the various papers on the history of agriculture in general, and of Brazilian agriculture in particular. We then sought to synthesize this cut history in the several studies of national and foreign authors, these studies, usually on economic history, seeking to give an approach that gives methodological coherence to the set. The need for this study, of course, the concern of conducting an investigation of the recent changes in agriculture in mechanization, chemicalization and biologization. It was concerned to conduct a more general study: the causes, determinants of this modernization, which was called late and uneven, to characterize them and locate them in space and in time. The trajectory of the study was related to the hysteria of technological innovations in agriculture, delimiting in the transformations occurred in the Brazilian agriculture, as a visible result of the process of accumulation of capital, driven by contradictions in the multiple spheres of capital in general, within the historical, structural or structural conditions favorable to to the emergence of sources of over profits or maintenance from them. The text is divided into four chapters. The first chapter deals with the theoretical-methodological foundation, with which body of the text. In the second chapter, we study the conjunctural and structural factors of the innovative antecedents in agriculture, locating them and characterizing them in three long cycles of economic expansion comprising two distinct moments of the international division of labor, the phase of free competition capitalism characterized by the internationalization of commodity capital and the phase of classical imperialist capitalism characterized by the internationalization of money capital. These first two chapters form the introductory body of the text. They allow us to visualize the historical process of relations between agriculture and world accumulation, the set of general determinations engendered in the contradictions that have arisen, surrounded or surpassed in the various spheres of capital in general. In the third chapter, we study the set of hierarchical relations between agriculture and industry in the internal and external plane, focusing them from a general framework of relations between the process of global accumulation and industrialization in Brazil, as well as its repercussions on the agriculture. Finally, in the fourth chapter, we study late industrialization as a manifestation of the international division of labor, and its manifestations in Brazilian agriculture, as a result of the set of contradictions engendered in the multiple spheres of capital, in its process of accumulation, reproduction and valorization, both internally and externally. These manifestations are expressed in the process of unequal modernization of Brazilian agriculture in recent years, consolidated by the massive flows of capital, led by the leadership of multinational firms.